When Bebo launched their platform last month, I suggested that we were witnessing the beginning of the social platform wars. It now appears that Facebook may have already won the first platform war. If you were expecting a massive transfer of developers over to the Bebo platform, you would have guessed wrong. So far 1375 applications have launched on the Bebo platform. Of those, only 358 were launched this month. If this isn’t a bad omen, how about the fact that their platform has experienced the most downtime of any social network this year to date.

I spoke with a number of developers that are on both Facebook and Bebo and the overall response was slowing growth and not enough integration points in contrast to Facebook. Without developer evangelists that support the Bebo platform it will be extremely difficult for their platform to experience the monstrous growth that Facebook has since the launch of their platform.

The largest test of the platform wars will be the roll-out of the MySpace and Orkut platforms at the beginning of next month. During March we will see the first test of OpenSocial and whether or not it can live up to the hype. So far it has been frequently criticized due to the challenges posed to developers. If you write a MySpace application you can’t simply port it to Orkut. Instead you need to modify portions of each application. It will be interesting to see how things pan out in March.

One of the big news items today is Friendfeed receiving a $5 million round of funding and their public launch. There has been a significant amount of discussion surrounding FriendFeed and whether or not it can compete with Facebook. Eric Eldon accurately sums up the current differentiation between the two feeds:

The Facebook news feed is already chock-full of your friends activities on Facebook, like when they add a new friend, break up with their girl/boyfriend, or decide to attend an event. This is information about your friends’ lives. FriendFeed, in contrast is purely about the online media you and your friends think is most interesting.

For the moment, this differentiation exists but I would argue not for long. One of Facebook’s primary values is its highly optimized newsfeed. If a competitor can take a portion of Facebook’s market share, the long-term effect is a less accurate image of an individual’s social graph. This is why Facebook is going to open up their newsfeed to compete directly with FriendFeed as Mike Arrington suggested.

While I argued that the “opening of the newsfeed” was in fact most likely the public launch of Beacon, the implications are still the same. As soon as Facebook enables the tracking of user activity on external sites, FriendFeed will prove less useful. Why am I going to go add all of my friends on FriendFeed yet again? Eric Eldon suggests that FriendFeed differentiates itself by only tracking those friends that you care about. I argue that Facebook can resolve that issue with a more effective newsfeed algorithm.

Do you think FriendFeed can compete with Facebook?

There is this whole movement for data portability and single source logins currently taking place within the blogosphere. This movement has begun to gain some traction but you have two sides at the table (users and data owners); neither of which want to act in the others’ best interest. No matter where we register we still need an effective way of sorting our relationships. That is what Facebook is focusing most of their efforts on in contrast to all the other social networks.  Even if Facebook were to become a tool for our desktop, it will still have the most effective image of our social graph.

While everyone is arguing about how many users their site has, Facebook is working hard at piecing together the puzzle of our individual social graphs. The theory is that if they can most accurately copy our social graph via their friend grouping features, etc, no matter what site we go to, Facebook will become the center of our social identity.

At a certain point, Facebook will pull the switch and enable websites outside of Facebook to query their database and get our friends’ data. Everytime you register for a site you can enter your Facebook email or id and it will immediately notify you about which friends have registered for the new site. The platform in turn is simply the first step to Facebook completely opening. Users will continue to add applications just as they will continue to register for other sites.

Will external sites be able to copy Facebook’s social data if they open up? Not at all.  Users will have an internal switchboard just as they do with Beacon to control what sites have access to our information. At any point we will be able to turn off access or turn on access. While this is still just a dream I am confident that soon we will see this become a reality. Facebook will be forced to open up in the near future. Users may not have complete ownership of their social graph but Facebook will at least enable them to extend it to other sites.

We may ultimately end up seeing OpenID versus Facebook. Do you think Facebook will take the next step and open up the social graph?

Last night I was reading through my RSS feeds and noticed an overall negative tone of the current coverage of Facebook. Brian Groom of the Financial Times reported on information that we posted last week. I’m not sure why this news was recirculated again yesterday but there was coverage about Facebook’s January traffic drop just about everywhere you looked. Fox News proclaimed that the “Facebook Death Spiral Has Begun”.

Media loves negative sensationalism but this is seriously repetitive. Yesterday I continued to receive messages from members, friend requests from other users and my newsfeed updated me on my friends’ latest activities. This will continue and Facebook will continue to grow over the next few months. While many have stated that they have experienced Facebook fatigue, chance are good that this is not the only service they are fatigued from. Facebook is one of the few companies that do anything to fight feature fatigue.

While there will alway be new services that we can register for, recreating our entire social network in each place has already become extremely annoying. That’s why I would argue that users won’t go through all the effort of recreating all the connections they’ve entered in Facebook. After registering for enough social networks, it has become a redundant process that anybody would want to avoid. That’s why they will return to Facebook at least for the next few months and we will see continued growth.

Phil Edwards has a great post on the Lonely CEO blog about how to prevent application reviews from damaging user growth. As most successful application developers know, keeping users happy requires responding regularly to critical feedback. Recently, Facebook updated application pages to display user reviews so that new users can see what sort of feedback users have been giving. I have even seen a few people aggressively target applications to try to damage their overall rating.

I definitely do not recommend these types of tactics as Facebook will most definitely begin to track user feedback history and penalize those that attempt to unjustly damage other applications’ ratings. Currently, application developers cannot remove poor reviews and this can make it difficult to obtain new users. In order to work around the issue, Phil has suggested that application owners do two things:

1. Drag the wall above the reviews section on the application about page. This will ensure that most negative feedback is entered on the wall rather than on the reviews.
2. Display reviews only to installed users. There is a setting for applications that enables reviews only to be displayed to those users that have installed the application.

Have you had any issues with application reviews? Do you think Facebook should make reporting a more efficient process?

According to The Independent, an Irish news publication, revenue inspectors have been trawling Facebook profiles to gather information for auditing. “Evert Bopp, a Dutch technology entrepreneur, was shocked when a tax inspector produced a print out of his activities on social networking sites.” Have you been trying to avoid paying taxes? If so you may want to turn up the privacy setting on your Facebook profile because soon enough you may have an IRS inspector poking around at your pictures to see if you’ve been living beyond your reported means.

As Facebook grows in popularity, we will continue to hear reports of people getting sued, arrested and audited for compromising photos that they placed on their profile or incriminating information that they’ve written. It should be common sense that if you are breaking the law, don’t post information about it on your profile. Some criminals just aren’t smart though and they end up in jail after posting compromising photos.

Posting phrases such as “I shot the sheriff” or photo captions such as “chugging liquor and smoking a doobie” are probably not a good idea to be posting if you want to stay clear of legal problems. Then again, you do have freedom of speech so feel free to post whatever you want!

There are two new jobs that have been posted on our job board for working at Gratis Internet. I have had the opportunity to speak with founders and a number of other employees on a number of occasions since they are a local D.C. company. They are one of the few local organizations that have a heavy presence on Facebook and they are preparing to launch some exciting new products. If you are into Facebook or internet marketing I highly suggest you check out the following jobs:

• Software Engineer, Social Networking Applications
• Technical Sales Manager

If you are hiring at your company, then I highly suggest trying out the AllFacebook Job Board. Also, for this week only we are offering a 15% discount off the normal price by entering the discount code AFJOBS.

In a couple days, Facebook is going to begin rolling out new features to user profiles. They released a statement yesterday that they will be rolling out new features over the coming weeks. According to Facebook:

The improved profile design helps better align the goals of application developers with the principles of the Platform ecosystem by:

* Helping users communicate and share information more efficiently
* Generating more meaningful activity
* Providing valuable information to users
* Increasing user trust

Applications that further these objectives will be more successful and achieve greater usage. We encourage application developers to focus on building applications that facilitate communication, generate meaningful activity, and increase users’ trust.

I am confident that this will be much welcomed news from developers after a series of restrictive moves by Facebook that limited application virality. Facebook will need to keep developers happy if they wish to remain the leading platform among social networks. Facebook will provide developers with a number of new integration points but emphasizes that “Applications that use these tools in a way that users find valuable and meaningful will find success. However, some challenges could lie ahead for those applications that don’t provide value and meaning for users.”

Consider this a warning of even more aggressive moves to block spam. This will be welcomed news to all the users that are getting fed up with all the “annoying” application requests. I look forward to seeing what Facebook has up their sleeve later this week!

Last night Mike Arrington posted news that Facebook is opening up their newsfeed. In other words, Beacon is going live. Arrington suggests that this new feature will be competition to FriendFeed. News flash: Facebook is already competition to Friend Feed!

The Newsfeed is Already Open
When Facebook launched their platform last May, thousands of websites jumped at the opportunity to increase their reach by building new Facebook applications. In a matter of months, building a Facebook application became a standard practice for anyone with a “web 2.0″ site or anybody with an already popular website. There are already applications from Digg, Twitter, YouTube, eBay and virtually every other large social website.

If you take a look at my mini-feed you will see updates from Twitter already as well as a beacon notification that I was playing a game on Kongregate. Thanks to applications being granted the ability to create newsfeed stories, you can view what I’m doing across the web. If I choose not to install a website’s application, my friends will not be able to see what I’m up to on the other sites.

Has Facebook Conceded That the Web Is Not and Won’t Be Blue and White?
Opening up the newsfeed to enable other sites to post items makes sense only if Facebook has determined that applications aren’t for everybody. Currently there are Facebook applications that exist to extend the functionality of other websites. The sole purpose of these applications is to extend functionality to your Facebook profile.

The del.icio.us application for example is described as creating “a bridge between your del.icio.us and Facebook accounts allowing you to display your recent bookmarks on your profile. You can also display recently saved bookmarks in the News Feed.” The sole purpose of the application is to get the bookmarks into your friends’ newsfeeds in turn extending the del.icio.us brand and bringing more data into your social profile.

The Newsfeed Is Becoming More Competitive
When Facebook opens up Beacon to other websites, applications are going to face even more competition. If you thought Facebook placed a squeeze on application developers by cutting back on notifications and requests, wait until they are competing for newsfeed space with other websites!

If Mike Arrington’s sources are correct, it appears that Facebook will be pushing Beacon live to the world in the near future. This is going to completely change the platform. I would argue that when Facebook opens up Beacon it may suddenly become too expensive for application developers to build applications instead of websites outside of Facebook’s “social graph.”

In turn, an application that becomes viral on Facebook is just as likely to become viral outside of Facebook. This could have significant implications. How do you think beacon will impact applications?

So there is continued discussion about the Facebook “adults” leaving Facebook behind because it’s making them batty (or at least they’re getting bitten by vampires and zombies which isn’t good). Rory Cellan-Jones uses yesterday’s statistics from the U.K. that Facebook has suffered its first monthly decline since becoming the largest social network in the U.K. as evidence to support his argument of an adult exodus.

In a lunch meeting yesterday, I listened to one tech luminary explain the challenge of maintaining a Facebook profile due to an massive influx of friend requests and application invitations. Facebook has added a number of tools but for many it has been too little, too late. Honestly, adults that spend hours on Facebook are probably not making the best use of their time. I myself have tried to reduce my total Facebook usage but as the primary writer of this blog it has become increasing difficult.

While sitting at lunch yesterday I began to wonder if all these new spam measures being enacted by Faebook are reactionary as well as protection against this proclaimed exodus. Does Facebook have access to early warning signs that we haven’t seen? Perhaps the naysayers are right and last month’s decline in the U.K. is going to be continued into February in March. For the time being, I’m going to continue cheering Facebook and I am still bullish on the company. Do you think Facebook’s on the decline?